I was going to put this inside the forum on Rob Bell's book but it seemed to merit its own new thread. What's been amazing to me after having read Love Wins is how many people want to believe that it questions the existence of hell as opposed to articulating a different understanding for what hell really is. The figure who most represents "eternal conscious torment" in Bell's book is the older brother of the prodigal son, a man who hates his father's grace because he wants for his works-righteousness to earn him something that his little brother can't have. What if that's precisely the attitude that we need to be liberated from by the cross?

Why does Christ's atonement have to be our salvation from God's externally-imposed punishment rather than being our liberation from the ontological consequences of our own self-righteousness? What if the point of the cross is not to change God's mind about us but to change our minds about God? This is not hard for a Methodist pastor like me to roll with because we say it every time we declare absolution after a prayer of confession in our liturgy ("Christ died while we were still sinners. That proves God's love for us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven"). What if we are the ones who need to have something proved to us by the cross, not God? What if the satisfaction of the cross is for our sake, not for God's sake?

As a Wesleyan who believes in prevenient grace, I tend to think that God loves us whether or not we choose to accept that love. If we accept God's love, then eternity in His fiery arms is infinite comfort; if reject His love, then it is a lake of fire. We can follow the older brother of the prodigal son into the outer darkness, or we can accept our status as pampered prodigals and enjoy the party our Father throws for us.

I think this way of understanding things helps to resolve the logical problem of "justification by faith." If justification by faith signifies God's evaluation of our "faithful" response to His love, there is no way that response can avoid being a work and we end up with a form of works-righteousness, whether it's ascetic works-righteousness (as it was for Pelagius), sacramental works-righteousness (as it was for the late medieval Catholics), or doctrinal works-righteousness (as it is for many conservative evangelicals today). The only way around this conundrum is to cheat (via Calvinism) and say that God isn't evaluating our responses to His love but evaluating His own predestined choices which is a scandalous and unnecessary smear on God's character. I wrote a blog about this question here: http://morganguyton.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/justification-by-faith-3-perspectives.

To me, justification by faith does not signify a decision God makes about the faithfulness of our response to Him but it describes the liberation that is inherent within pistis itself. When we trust Christ's justification, we step out of the prison of our self-justification that is the default human ontology produced by rational self-awareness, which might be called the byproduct of eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. As long as we're stuck in the prison of self-justification, we persist in eternal separation from God because we are trying to be our own gods whether we recognize this or not. The only way to enter into communion with God is to stop declaring our independence from Him and renounce our need to tell ourselves we're right about everything (which is the definitive characteristic of homo curvatus in se). Then the Holy Spirit can judge and sanctify us and draw us into loving intimacy with God and each other.

Perhaps hell is needing to be right so badly that we fold our arms tightly and spend eternity pouting in the corner when God says you're wrong in so many ways but I love you anyway. What do you think of this account?